Community

Haskell 2010: A major event in 2009 was the release of the Haskell 2010 standard — the first official revision to the language since Haskell ’98, and the first result of the Haskell Prime process. The new language standard will form the core of a rolling language upgrade in coming years.

Hackathons go global: For the past 3 years, a series of Haskell hackathons have been held in Europe, one or two a year, as the Hac series. In 2009, we held 4 hackathons, and for the first time, two in North America: in Portland,EdinburghPhiladelphia and Utrecht. The next Hackathon is in Zurich in March 2010.

Dataflow Optimizing Backend: ﻿Norman Ramsey and João Dias presented a new dataflow optimizing backend for GHC, making it easier to do some very aggressive low level optimizations late in the compilation phase.

Supercompilation for GHC? Yet more work on the optimization front, a design was developed for adding a supercompilation phase to GHC, making possible whole new classes of aggressive code transformation optimizations that were previously quite difficult.

UHC: At the Utrecht Hackathon on April, the first release of UHC, the Utrecht Haskell Compiler was announced, a new Haskell compiler with a GRIN-based intermediate representation, which makes extensive use of attribute grammars in its construction.

Libraries and Distribution

The Haskell Platform: in 2009, a major effort was launched to provide a single “batteries included” library suite for Haskell, suiting commercial, open source and research needs. The result is The Haskell Platform, (also now available in Debian), a single installer for a complete GHC-based Haskell system, including extensive libraries. By the year’s end there had been 450 thousand downloads of the binary installers!

Hackage: Hackage is the central repository for Haskell libraries and applications, and, along with Cabal, provides a publishing, distribution, and dependency resolution system for all Haskell code. Hackage continues to grow in 2009, faster than in 2008. There have been 3500+ package updates this year, so we now have 1750 Haskell packages available on Hackage in total, up from 750 a year ago. The size of Hackage is phenomenal, as you can see when you visualize the Haskell Universe. Earlier in the year, we reached one million Haskell downloads on Hackage. November 2009 was the first month with more than 100k downloads from Hackage in a single month.

Associated Types for Optimizations: Another popular post was on self-optimizing data structures, by Don Stewart, showing how to statically specialize the layout of Haskell container data types, improving data density and performance.

darcs: the darcs revision control system world was extremely active this year, with darcs 2.2 and darcs 2.3 released (along with a Summer of code project) and great strides in scalability via a new storage mechanism.